How did you get involved in this project?
In the usual way for me – an email out of the blue. Ari had been listening to my record The Blue Notebooks while writing the film – apparently he wrote it in a week while the CD was on repeat – so he thought since i’d already in a way scored the script, he might as well ask me to do the film. In the case of ‘Bashir,’ the minute I saw the short trailer Ari sent me I knew I had to do it – it was a bit like being struck by lightning.
Although the bulk of the score is all original work there are two “found objects” that inhabit a couple of cues. They are both piano pieces: the slow movement of Schubert D.959 and the well known “funeral march” from the Chopin Op.35. I used these fragments in the film after discussing with Ari his reasons for including the Schubert in the original trailer – turns out his mother was a pianist and that these pieces meant something to him personally. So it made perfect sense to refer to this material in a couple of scenes.
I felt like the entire film should have this “haunted” quality, so the music is like a hallucination – actually this is pretty natural territory for me. The main “haunted ocean” music is all about that – a sort of unresolved, weightless, lost melancholia is the general tone I was looking for.
Ari had temp-tracked some scene with some very good music – bits and pieces of Sigur Ros, Brian Eno etc. So I had a good sense of one possible way through the material, but I decided to put the temps aside and just write a first set of sketches off the script instead. I started to chase down that feeling I got from the material and wrote “The Haunted Ocean” straight onto the paper. It was a one cup of coffee moment. Once I had that down, everything else just fell into place. Ari is very into music himself so he was really an ideal director to collaborate with. It was just a great experience batting material back and forth every few weeks between us, so the images and score could evolve in parallel.
You worked with Future Sounds Of London in the past, any prospects of doing electronic music again?
I try not to think of categories in music and I shuffle between both “classical” music and more “experimental” and “post rock” traditions…so I feel like i’m dipping into all these different cultures all the time. It’s a question of finding the right mix of elements for each situation – like a kid in the chemistry lab I just keep pouring stuff into the test tube until it goes BOOM.
There are so many interesting film makers out there. Again in no particular order, some of the ones who are using music in really creative ways. Alexander Sokhurov, Gus Van Sant, Sally Potter, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Bill Viola, Tran Anh Hung, Godard (!), Ang Lee, Wes Anderson….so many others.
BTW, “Waltz With Bashir” is now coming out in graphic novel form. Very cool.
The Schubert wasn't acknowledged in the film at all (credits I mean) – a bit of a shame. Not sure what real relevance Schubert has to the story in the film? Is the fact that the director's mum used to play it on the piano a good enough reason to make such extensive use of a great existing piece? It is beautiful but it's part of an incredible sonata or three movements not just one that belong to a very different context in my humble opinion